I am in the process of purchasing memory for one of my two complete systems.

I am currently running the 970 CPU set up, it has 6 gigs of memory installed on it.

I can also run the 2600K CPU as my main computer as well, right now I can only run 4 gigs of memory on it.

One of the machines would become my main while the other would become a HTPC, so I can't steal or barrow memory from one and put in another machine. As both machines need to be up and running.

Now my question is this.

Should I put the 970 CPU as a HTPC and purchase 8 gigs of memory for the 2600K set up and use this set up as my main computer. Really and truly i am not using the full capabilities of the 970 hex CPU, and the all out frequencies I can hit on the 2600K would clearly make up for any loss of threads.

Or should I keep the 2600K CPU as a HTPC, and purchasing 6 more gigs of memory for the 970 and make it have 12 gigs of memory.

The memory I would be using would be 1600 MHz 8-8-8-24 timings, because that is what is currently installed onto both machines. So I might be able to add the 4 Gigs from the 2600K to the 8 Gigs I will be putting in it, if I choose to use it as my main.

If you had to choose what would be your choice? The core i7 970 @ 4.2 GHz, or the 2600K @ 5.1 GHz? After about 3.8 GHz both system perform nearly identical to one another in the gaming department. At least it is not much of a major difference between them, at least from what I could tell after doing extensive testing.

you just answered your own question the 2600k would be best to use as your main and the 970 hex as the htpc. the 970 doesn't currently use the cores properly yet as no software/program is set to use more than 4 cores. hardware technology is getting faster and software technology is getting slower